Making Samus...again

Last year I made a Samus Aran costume for PAX East.  The results were pretty good for my second real costume, but I wanted to improve on the costume.  This meant using some sturdier materials for the armor bits.  Also, I wanted a sweet Samus helmet.

The armor was made from 1/8" sintra.  Rob and I had a some good times cutting it out and molding it.

We had the oven set to 250 to heat the sintra on a cookie sheet.

Here's Rob doing some sanding on the helmet.  He got a child's sized helmet from a student of his and sanded off the paint.

The chin portion of the helmet was also cut from sintra.

The visor was an extra visor that we had ordered. 

We also used sippy cups and whiffle balls for the jets.

The helmet got a couple of bowls cup and epoxied into place for the ear parts.  The hose came from Lowe's. 

Here's a shot of the shin pieces.  Epoxy/sand/bondo/sand/bondo/sand/sand/sand/etc.

Eventually, all of the pieces got similar paint treatment as Rob's armor.  I didn't do any weathering on mine because Samus is too bad ass to take any damage.

The should armor we reused from last year.  However, they were rebuilt and painted fresh. 

 

And here we have a completed helmet.  I want to point out that a lot of the armor had lines cut into it and lined in black.  The chin piece got some silver rub'n'buff to make it look more metallic.

 Here is most of the armor put together.  We had a few options for the abdominal section, but we decided to use the one from last year. It was still quite good and took a coat or two of paint to match the rest of the costume.  

We didn't get too many pics of the upgraded arm cannon, but this shows the new LED system.  We took a 3" PVC pipe and wrapped a sintra cone shaped piece around it to get a nice bevel.  The inner part of the cannon had the LEDs on it and the cone slipped over.  The end of the cannon had a 3" to 2" adapter and a strong LED flashlight in the end.  I am looking forward to improving this part even further.

Lens flare!!!

There is a Metroid just to the left of the screen that totally just got blasted.